Music, punnery and srs bzness
Jun. 14th, 2008 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchikThe extent to which I cannot resist a pun is ridiculous. Seriously. Okay, here are two things I came out with the past week.
On leaving poetry lying around in public places: "Litterature."
And (23:35:21) Stan: my psych lecturer looks like Colonel Sanders. That is all.
(23:36:00) Maggie: lol!
(23:36:13) Maggie: kentucky freud chicken
SOMEBODY STOP ME.
The awesome thing about![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bandombigbang, aside of course from all the long and awesome fic, is the mixes. Since everyone in bandom shares at least some of my music taste, I'm getting a lot of cool songs in the mixes and looking up the artists.
For example, Chiodos. I'd never heard of them, but they're pretty cool. Another band I've gotten into lately is Street to Nowhere... but I'm actually not sure I got them from big bang mix, because I think it was a bit earlier than that.
...and on the other hand, I now know that Rufus Wainwright wrote a song called Gay Messiah. I'm not super into his music, but honestly. That song is UTTERLY RIDICULOUS. Just, WHAT.
Something Completely Different: a post by Stele3 got me to actually bring my thoughts on abortion into some sort of coherent order, so I'm posting them here, just so I've got a clear position ready next time an argument breaks out.
Stele3's post was about whether late-term abortions should be illegal or not, incidentally, and this was my response: I've actually been sort of thinking about this for a while. And it seems to me that it's all a question of us, as human beings, deliberately drawing lines, and much of the turbulence around the issue is a result of not acknowledging what we're doing.
The thing is, when I say that we're drawing an arbitrary line, one side of which is "human," people tend to get upset, because of the negative connotations of the word "arbitrary." I don't think of it that way. Obviously we have to draw the line, there is no subtlety about a life-or-death issue. I think in reality the process of becoming human is entirely gradual, but in this context we have to actually draw the line somewhere, for the purpose of making decisions.
And the fact is, there is no objectively right place to draw the line. That's obvious when you keep in mind that the line is a construct, adopted out of necessity, and not a reflection of the physical world in which everything has a gradient. But we forget, we tend to blur the distinction between the universe in our heads and the one our bodies live in, so we argue from (this is where I know there's a latin word meaning first principles but cannot remember it) rather than adopting a utilitarian perspective. We have these huge rows over when exactly a fetus becomes a human in which each side gives its own argument the weight of objective truth, which makes them even more vehement about it.
But in all honesty. The Romans drew the line at a week AFTER birth. They didn't want to have to name and mourn all the children that died in that first week, because that number back then would be stunningly high to us. It would be a full-scale tragedy if our newborns had that kind of survival rate, because we draw our legal line at birth. By "legal line" I mean citizenship, being "in the system" as it were. Of course various people draw their moral line in various places before that, because a woman who loses her baby a week before it was due isn't going to consider that a lesser loss than if it just died postnatally.
So I think you're onto the general principle of line-drawing here by labelling your reasoning as "independent survival" - the thing is that five months is the time when babies in modern state-of-the-art hospitals have a reasonable expectation of survival. In ancient Rome, a week after birth was it. In third world countries today, or even in poorer areas of our own countries, it's varied but certainly not as early as five months.
At which point we hit the problem of legislation, and that one's tough. After all, if we define illegal abortion by the baby's ability to survive outside the womb, are we going to let the best of circumstances or the worst be our benchmark? Do we take an average? Do we make it different for different circumstances? How much leeway do we allow? It's monumentally unfair for one day's unavoidable delay to suddenly shift an abortion from legal to murder.
I hope I've managed to express my thoughts clearly. I have even more views on the objective/construction dichotomy as relates to abortion but I think this will do for now :P
On leaving poetry lying around in public places: "Litterature."
And (23:35:21) Stan: my psych lecturer looks like Colonel Sanders. That is all.
(23:36:00) Maggie: lol!
(23:36:13) Maggie: kentucky freud chicken
SOMEBODY STOP ME.
The awesome thing about
bandombigbang, aside of course from all the long and awesome fic, is the mixes. Since everyone in bandom shares at least some of my music taste, I'm getting a lot of cool songs in the mixes and looking up the artists.For example, Chiodos. I'd never heard of them, but they're pretty cool. Another band I've gotten into lately is Street to Nowhere... but I'm actually not sure I got them from big bang mix, because I think it was a bit earlier than that.
...and on the other hand, I now know that Rufus Wainwright wrote a song called Gay Messiah. I'm not super into his music, but honestly. That song is UTTERLY RIDICULOUS. Just, WHAT.
Something Completely Different: a post by Stele3 got me to actually bring my thoughts on abortion into some sort of coherent order, so I'm posting them here, just so I've got a clear position ready next time an argument breaks out.
Stele3's post was about whether late-term abortions should be illegal or not, incidentally, and this was my response: I've actually been sort of thinking about this for a while. And it seems to me that it's all a question of us, as human beings, deliberately drawing lines, and much of the turbulence around the issue is a result of not acknowledging what we're doing.
The thing is, when I say that we're drawing an arbitrary line, one side of which is "human," people tend to get upset, because of the negative connotations of the word "arbitrary." I don't think of it that way. Obviously we have to draw the line, there is no subtlety about a life-or-death issue. I think in reality the process of becoming human is entirely gradual, but in this context we have to actually draw the line somewhere, for the purpose of making decisions.
And the fact is, there is no objectively right place to draw the line. That's obvious when you keep in mind that the line is a construct, adopted out of necessity, and not a reflection of the physical world in which everything has a gradient. But we forget, we tend to blur the distinction between the universe in our heads and the one our bodies live in, so we argue from (this is where I know there's a latin word meaning first principles but cannot remember it) rather than adopting a utilitarian perspective. We have these huge rows over when exactly a fetus becomes a human in which each side gives its own argument the weight of objective truth, which makes them even more vehement about it.
But in all honesty. The Romans drew the line at a week AFTER birth. They didn't want to have to name and mourn all the children that died in that first week, because that number back then would be stunningly high to us. It would be a full-scale tragedy if our newborns had that kind of survival rate, because we draw our legal line at birth. By "legal line" I mean citizenship, being "in the system" as it were. Of course various people draw their moral line in various places before that, because a woman who loses her baby a week before it was due isn't going to consider that a lesser loss than if it just died postnatally.
So I think you're onto the general principle of line-drawing here by labelling your reasoning as "independent survival" - the thing is that five months is the time when babies in modern state-of-the-art hospitals have a reasonable expectation of survival. In ancient Rome, a week after birth was it. In third world countries today, or even in poorer areas of our own countries, it's varied but certainly not as early as five months.
At which point we hit the problem of legislation, and that one's tough. After all, if we define illegal abortion by the baby's ability to survive outside the womb, are we going to let the best of circumstances or the worst be our benchmark? Do we take an average? Do we make it different for different circumstances? How much leeway do we allow? It's monumentally unfair for one day's unavoidable delay to suddenly shift an abortion from legal to murder.
I hope I've managed to express my thoughts clearly. I have even more views on the objective/construction dichotomy as relates to abortion but I think this will do for now :P
